The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 16, Sir Richard Francis Burton [novels to read for beginners TXT] 📗

to publish the rest of the series under pain of legal prosecution. In the same paper (October 31, ‘85; see also November 7, ‘85) I find:—

 

The authorities have discovered where Capt. Burton’s “Thousand and One Nights”

is being printed, despite the author’s efforts to keep the place a secret, but are undecided whether to suppress it or to permit the publication of the coming volumes. Burton’s own footnotes are so voluminous that they exceed the letterpress of the text proper, and make up the bulk of the work.[FN#459] The foulness of the second volume of his translation places it at a much higher premium in the market than the first.

 

The Tribune of Chicago (October 26,‘85) honours me by declaring “It has been resolved to request Captain Burton not to publish the rest of his translation of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ which is really foul and slipshod as to style.” The New York Times (October 17 and November 9, ‘85) merely echoes the spite of its English confrere:—

 

Capt. Burton’s translation of the “Arabian Nights” bears the imprint “Benares.” Of course the work never saw Benares. America, France, Belgium and Germany have all been suggested as the place of printing, and now the Pall Mall Gazette affirms that the work was done “north of the Tweed.” There is, without doubt, on British soil, it says, “a press which year after year produces scores of obscene publications.”

 

And the same is the case with the St. Louis Post Dispatch (November 11, ‘85) the Mail Express of New York (November 23,‘85); the Weekly Post of Boston (November 27 ‘85), which again revives a false report, and with the Boston Herald (December 16,‘85). The Chicago Daily News (January 30, ‘86) contains a malicious sneer at the Kamashastra Society. The American Register (Paris, July 25, ‘86) informs its client�le, “If, as is generally supposed, Captain Burton’s book is printed abroad, the probability is that every copy will on arrival be confiscated as ‘indecent’ by the Custom-house.” And to curtail a long list of similar fadaises I will quote the Bookmart (of Pittsburg, Pa., U.S.A., October, ‘86): “Sir Richard Burton’s ‘Nights’ are terribly in want of the fig-leaf, if anything less than a cabbage leaf will do, before they can be fit (fitted?) for family reading. It is not possible (Is it not possible?) that by the time a household selection has been sifted out of the great work, everything which makes the originality and the value—such as it is—of Richard’s series of volumes will have disappeared, and nothing will remain but his diverting lunacies of style.” The Bookmart, I am informed, is edited by one Halkett Lord, an unnaturalised Englishman who finds it pays best to abuse everything and everyone English. And lastly, the Springfield Republican (April 5, ‘88) assures me that I have published “fully as much as the (his?) world wants of the ‘Nights’.”

 

In the case of “The Nights,” I am exposed to that peculiar Protestant form of hypocrisy, so different from the Tartuffean original of Catholicism, and still as mighty a motor force, throughout the length and breadth of the North-American continent, as within the narrow limits of England. There also as here it goes hand-in-hand with “Respectability” to blind judgment and good sense.

 

A great surgeon of our day said (or is said to have said) in addressing his students:— “Never forget, gentlemen, that you have to deal with an ignorant public.” The dictum may fairly be extended from medical knowledge to general information amongst the many headed of England; and the Publisher, when rejecting a too recondite book, will repeat parrot-fashion, The English public is not a learned body. Equally valid is the statement in the case of the Anglo-American community which is still half-educated and very far from being erudite. The vast country has produced a few men of great and original genius, such as Emerson and Theodore Parker, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman; but the sum total is as yet too small to leaven the mighty mass which learns its rudiments at school and college and which finishes its education with the newspaper and the lecture. When Emerson died it was said that the intellectual glory of a continent had departed; but Edgar A. Poe, the peculiar poetic glory of the States, the first Transatlantic who dared be himself and who disdained to borrow from Schiller and Byron, the outlander poet who, as Edgar Allan Poe, is now the prime favourite in France, appears to be still under ban because he separated like Byron from his spouse, and he led a manner of so-called “Bohemian” life. Indeed the wide diffusion of letters in the States, that favourite theme for boasting and bragging over the unenlightened and analphabetic Old World, has tended only to exaggerate the defective and disagreeable side of a national character lacking geniality and bristling with prickly individuality. This disposition of mind, whose favourable and laudable presentations are love of liberty and self-reliance, began with the beginnings of American history. The “Fathers,” Pilgrim and Puritan, who left their country for their country’s good and their own, fled from lay tyranny and clerkly oppression only to oppress and tyrannise over others in new and distant homes. Hardly had a century and a half elapsed before the sturdy colonists, who did not claim freedom but determined to keep it, formally revolted and fought their way to absolute independence—not, by the by, a feat whereof to be overproud when a whole country rose unanimously against a handful of troops. The movement, however, reacted powerfully upon the politics of Europe, which stood agape for change, and undoubtedly precipitated the great French Revolution. As soon as the States became an empire, their democratic and republican institutions at once attracted hosts of emigrants from the Old World, thus peopling the land with a selection of species: the active and the adventurous, the malcontent and the malefactor, readily expatriate themselves, while the pauvre diable remains at home. The potato-famine in Ireland (1848) gave an overwhelming impetus to the exode of a race which had never known a racial baptism; and, lastly, the Germans flying from the conscription, the blood tax of the Fatherland, carried with them over the ocean a transcendentalism which has engendered the wildest theories of socialism and communism. And the emigration process still continues. Whole regions, like the rugged Bocche di Cattaro in Dalmatia and pauper Iceland, are becoming depopulated to me the wonder is that a poor man ever consents to live out of America or a rich man to live.

 

The result of such selection has been two-fold. The first appears in a splendid self-esteem, a complacency, a confidence which passes all bounds of the golden mean. “I am engrossed in calmly contemplating the grandeur of my native country and her miraculous growth,” writes to me an old literary friend. The feeling normally breaks out in the grossest laudation of everything American. The ultra-provincial twang which we still hear amongst the servant-classes of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and which is so notable in the nouveau riche, modified by traditional nasalisation and, as in Australia, by climatic influences, is American and, therefore, the purest of English utterances. The obsolete vocabulary often obsolete in England without just reason—contrasting with a modern disfigured etymology which strips vocables of their genealogy and history, is American and ergo admirably progressive.

The spurious facetiousness which deals mainly in mere jargon words ill-spelt and worse pronounced; in bizarre contrast of ideas, and in ultra-Rabelaisian exaggeration, is American wit and humour—therefore unsurpassable. The Newspaper Press, that great reflector of nationalities, that prime expression of popular taste, too often of an �c�urant vulgarity, personal beyond all bounds of common decency, sensational as a transpontine drama, is American; America is the greatest nation upon earth’s face, ergo the daily sheet is setting-up the standard of English speech and forming the language of the Future, good and too good for all the world. This low standard of the Press is the more regretable as its exalted duty is at present to solve the highest problems social and industrial, such as co-operation in labour, the development of fisheries, direct taxation versus indirect and a host of enigmas which the young world, uncumbered by the burdens of the Old World, alone shall unravel.

 

The second result is still more prejudicial and perilous. This is the glorification of mediocrity, of the average man and woman whose low standard must be a norm to statesman and publicist. Such cult of the common and the ignoble is the more prejudicial because it “wars against all distinction and against the sense of elevation to be gained by respecting and admiring superiority.” Its characteristic predominance in a race which, true to its Anglo-Saxon origin, bases and builds the strongest opinions upon the weakest foundations, hinders the higher Avatars of genius and interferes with the “chief duty of a nation which is to produce great men.” It accounts for the ever-incroaching reign of women in literature—meaning as a rule cheap work and second-rate. And the main lack is not so much the “thrill of awe,” which G�ethe pronounces to be the best thing humanity possesses, but that discipline of respect, that sense of loyalty, not in its confined meaning of attachment to royalty, but in a far higher and nobler signification, the recognising and welcoming elevation and distinction whatever be the guise they may assume.

“The soul lives by admiration and hope and love.”

 

And here we see the shady side of the educational process, the diffusion of elementary and superficial knowledge, of the veneer and polish which mask, until chipped-off, the raw and unpolished material lying hidden beneath them.

A little learning is a dangerous thing because it knows all and consequently it stands in the way of learning more or much. Hence, it is sorely impatient of novelty, of improvement, of originality. It is intolerant of contradiction, irritable, thin-skinned, and impatient of criticism, of a word spoken against it. It is chargeable with the Law of Copyright, which is not only legalised plunder of the foreigner, but is unfair, unjust and ungenerous to native talent for the exclusive benefit of the short-sighted many-headed. I am far from charging the United States with the abomination called “International Copyright;” the English publisher is as sturdy an enemy to “protection” as the Transatlantic statesman; but we expect better things from a new people which enjoys the heritage of European civilisation without the sufferings accompanying the winning of it. This mediocrity has the furious, unpardoning hatred of l’amour propre offens�. Even a word in favour of my old friends the Mormons is an unpardonable offence: the dwarfish and dwarfing demon “Respectability” has made their barbarous treatment a burning shame to a so-called “free” country: they are subjected to slights and wrongs only for practicing polygamy, an institution never condemned by Christ or the early Christians. The calm and dispassionate judgments of Sir Lepel Griffith and the late Matthew Arnold, who ventured to state, in guarded language, that the boasted civilisation of the United States was not quite perfect, resulted in the former being called a snob and the latter a liar. English stolidity would only have smiled at the criticism even had it been couched in the language of persiflage. And when M. Max O’Rell traverses the statements of the two Englishmen and exaggerates American civilisation, we must bear in mind first that la vulgarit� ne se traduit pas, and secondly, that the foes of our foemen are our friends. Woe be to the man who refuses to fall down and do worship before that brazen-faced idol (Eidolon Novi Mundi), Public Opinion in the States; unless, indeed, his name be Brown and he hail from Briggsville.

 

Some years ago I proposed to write a paper upon the reflex action of Anglo-America upon England using as a base the last edition of Mrs. Trollope, who was